


Rise and Fall

by fatalchild



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-08
Updated: 2014-04-08
Packaged: 2018-01-18 14:12:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1431454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatalchild/pseuds/fatalchild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucifer has been patient. He has endured, waiting until the time of his release, the time when he can finally be reunited with his older brother. An eternity of torment will have been worth it if it means they can be together.<br/>(Tumblr prompt: Lucifer's ascension from Hell and his reaction when he sees Michael for the first time in eons.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rise and Fall

The sound is like breaking glass, sharp and sudden and keen. The first time startles him. A billion years have passed here, and that has never happened before. The noise comes from somewhere up high and echoes down like cracks splitting apart a wall. Lucifer screams to test if anyone can hear him. Nobody replies.

Twelve more sound before he’s really certain what they are. None are quite like the first; none reverberate so much as to shake Hell to its very foundation. Lucifer still screams sometimes. He’d given up on it for a while, when even his true voice was exhausted and raw from the effort. Now it is less a desperate wail than an inquisitive shout to see if anyone has dared close enough to check their progress. They haven’t.

Sixty-six is the magic number. Decades, even centuries pass between each note, but Lucifer knows that is an illusion. That is a trick of how time is bent here. He gets better at estimating when the next will come, and the agonized writhing that has contorted his form for so many years becomes sporadic twists of anticipation. The chains are falling away, weakening with each broken seal. By the time they reach forty, he’s actively struggling against his confines. By fifty, his shouting has become a near-constant cry. By sixty-five, his voice is lost in uneven, manic laughter and his body is straining against the weakening hold..

A flash of light and a soft thud as the body falls across the cold stone. The blood pools. Lucifer screams something frantic and hurtles himself towards the opening.

Emerging is almost as painful as falling was. It is a long climb, made no easier by wings that are scorched and torn almost beyond recognition. The door feels too small, and although it is fully open for him, Lucifer finds he still has to tear his way through. He knows what he’s being drawn to, knows what awaits him just on the other side, but that too is a lie. The chapel is empty, and somewhere far away, God is surely laughing at him.

Lucifer finds that the world has changed too much in some ways and not enough in others. His true form radiates pain that permeates him and saturates anything he tries to get close to. Chaos thrives in his wake, whether he likes it or not. Everything is his fault. This assertion earns little more than a dismissive laugh that rumbles across the world as a series of thunderstorms. Lucifer finds them beautiful in their way.

He folds himself up into the body of a depressed widower teetering on the edge of suicide. The soul is like a balm simply for the closeness it provides. This man named Nick gives himself over, and Lucifer’s first act is to string the entrails of an armed robber like a banner to announce his return. Promise thus kept, he begins his hunt for what he knows he needs, but like this, that is a means to an end, and the end hasn’t shown himself on Earth yet. Lucifer is equal parts patient and aware that time is not on his side.

As predicted, the body starts to decay. Lucifer is too bright, too cold, too much to contain, and the force of his grace presses against the confines of flesh as surely as it did those of the Cage. Borrowed skin begins to blister and split. Lucifer is accustomed to much worse now, but that does little for his irritation. He’s more troubled by how quickly time is slipping away than he is by the pain. A dusty mirror in an abandoned hall catches his reflection, and Lucifer’s face twists in a frown. A quiet whisper in the back of the archangel’s mind, Nick asks soon enough. Lucifer keeps his promise, refuses to lie, tells him what they’ve both known all along. Nick apologizes for his inadequacy, and Lucifer finds the first stirrings of tenderness for humanity to be uncomfortably strange. When the time comes, he tries to fold out of Nick gently, tries not to tear him apart as he did the door of the Cage. It is a smooth transition leaving nothing but peace in its wake.

There can be no avoiding it now. Lucifer picks through Sam’s mind and finds that Michael has found himself a secondary vessel. Of course, the body is inconsequential, and Lucifer prods for an image only out of latent curiosity before he simply rests back and waits for the revelation of the chosen locale. He laughs to find it’s a cemetery, wondering if that is supposed to be some sort of symbolic joke, but it hardly matters. Lucifer has no intention of dying.

Michael announces himself in a flurry of perfectly unblemished wings. The young face holds his expression well, though it’s not at all what Lucifer would have expected. There is a delicacy to the features that suits Michael’s beauty in a peculiar way that does not diminish his severity in the slightest. Sam accidentally calls this person Adam, and Lucifer can’t help but smile, wondering if this was Michael’s intended all along.

His gaze focuses past, and Lucifer is able to see the glimmer of a halo and the outline of those magnificent wings. This plane of existence confounds him still, and he finds it insufficient means to look upon what he has craved for so many millenia. He settles for watching the glint of his eyes and how he sets his jaw. Michael’s nostrils flare with agitation, and Lucifer can almost see his wings doing the same. They move in a slow circle around each other. Michael sidesteps, refusing to turn his back on his prey, and Lucifer sees the perfect soldier that their Father spent so much time and effort crafting his eldest to be. The dry earth below crunches in an odd misstep, Michael’s fist clenches, and Lucifer sees, for a moment, the older brother whom he loved so much, the one truly unwilling to do this.

They’ve come here to fight, and yet all Lucifer can think to do is touch. The body of this Adam is just a visage that is holding Michael inside, but with each passing moment, those eyes grow brighter with the self-righteous grace rising behind them. Lucifer sees Michael, sees the Prince of the Heavenly Host, sees his beautiful brother folding out from his vessel in preparation for combat, and all he can think is how neatly they would fit against each other. His grace calls to Michael’s beckoning him to abandon conflict for comfort, to settle close and wrap each other in tendrils of light, brushing feathers across old scars and seeking each other’s breath with greedily open mouths. They could, for a moment, cease to be the Heavenly Prince and the Infernal Dragon and return to being simply Michael and Lucifer if only they tried. But Michael doesn’t disappoint. He rejects Lucifer with all the scathing indifference as ever. The placid conviction that covers his face is as lovely as the flicker of doubt that crossed it only a second before, and Lucifer loves him no less for it. He doesn’t hate him any less either.

It’s the love that makes him reach out in the end, perhaps the hate that makes him hold tight and pull. There is no room for them where duty stands and only one place that duty cannot reach. It is, Lucifer decides, a far more poignant sort of pain that came from being cast down than the one that came from clawing his way back up, but the anguish of voluntary descent, the exquisite misery that comes as he folds his beloved up in his wings and condemns them both, is far better and far worse at once.

The door slams. Michael screams. The sound is like breaking glass.


End file.
